Perl becoming chaotic due to poor information and unclear instructions

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I am a long time use of Perl. It was very useful and reasonably clean. Lately, it has become a major challenge to get anything done with it because of its' chaotic state.

I'm trying to use AquaTerm on a Mac OS X Lion from Perl. I've installed the latest AquaTerm, latest perl, latest cpan, latest port, cpanm, etc. Each time I try to do a step of the process someone writes up to install PDL::Graphics, it involves running some long program that at the end say, "Failed" look at the log. I then find that I'm missing PDL::Core. I attempt to locate that to install, but my tool says I'm lacking foobar or something. Some of the port systems do a very good job of tracking down dependencies. I see many posts from people trying to resolve the same problem of PDL::FOO missing in the @INC. Why doesn't the system allow one to either port install PDL::FOO or cpan PDL::FOO and have it be sure that when done your system has a consistent set of code that will work! Is there a document somewhere that describes what port is for and what cpan is for and why sometimes we do git?

There should be a rational and straightforward way to locate and install sofware that is compatible and has all its dependencies. Without this we waste enormous amounts of time googling nonsense that is out of date, installing code that doesn't meet our requirements, etc.

Is there any part of the user community that feels things could be better? How can we work together to make it better?